“And I’m Not a Woman?” Discourse analysis in Brazilian journalistic outlets about transgender women in the 2024 Olympics. 1st in gender equity.

Abstract

The core of this article is to understand how Truth’s 1851 speech at the Women's Rights Convention—"Ain't I a Woman?"—reverberates in the construction of historical meanings regarding women and the historicity of ethnic-racial, class, and gender struggles. The guiding question seeks to analyze the conditions of production that shaped Black women’s struggle for equality in the 19th century, employing Materialist Discourse Analysis (MDA) based on Pêcheux (France) and Orlandi (Brazil). References to Judith Butler illuminate the debate on sex and gender as social constructions. In the pre-abolition period, Black women had to reaffirm themselves as women in the face of humiliations that reduced them to animals or non-humans; today, trans women also face the need to affirm their identities, even when their bodies challenge traditional feminine categories. Butler emphasizes the idea that "sex" is historicized and contested, rather than determined at birth; gender identity is performative and socially produced. Thus, sexual differences are not merely biological but are sustained by social structures that assign meanings to gender and sexuality. The analysis argues that gender identities are performative, shaped by discursive practices and power relations. Truth’s discourse functions as a milestone that challenges gender and racial hierarchies, opening space to understand how the struggles of Black women in the 19th and 20th centuries connect to intersectional struggles of class and sexuality. To this end, the theoretical-methodological assumptions of Materialist Discourse Analysis will be adopted, drawing from the works of Pêcheux in France and Orlandi in Brazil. This implies that we are inscribed within an "in-between," fluid (non-positivist), and open perspective. Regarding the conditions of production, Orlandi (2017, p. 17) points out that "the subject and the situation (...) are fundamental to discourse analysis (...) insofar as they are discursively redefined as part of the conditions of discourse production." It is concluded that sex never functions entirely separately from gender; sexual differences are, in fact, socially constructed as gender. These differences operate discursively through the performative invocation of gender, thereby assigning it a presumed meaning.